Pastor Alan Campbell is the Pentecostal pastor of the Cregagh Covenant People's Fellowship in Belfast, Northern Ireland, co-director of Open Bible Ministries with Glyn Jones, and a prominent scholar and lecturer in the British Israel movement. Campbell is also popular in Historicist circles because of his identification of the Papacy as the Antichrist of Biblical prophecy. Although his credentials as a pastor have been challenged, he has produced newspaper clippings and even the sermon preached at his ordination to prove the authenticity of his profession.

Campbell was born in Belfast on 6 August 1949 into a staunchly Presbyterian home, in a Roman Catholic area. His grandmother was a very firm adherent of the doctrine of British Israelism, and thus he was exposed to this teaching from a very early age. Despite his upbringing, however, he didn't experience a true conversion to Christianity until 19 September 1965, when he repented in the Ravenhill Free Presbyterian Church after listening to Ian Paisley preach on Matthew 8:12 ("But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth").

Campbell states that, shortly after being "saved" (a common term among evangelical Christians, used to denote their conversion): "I began to attend Bible Studies on the subject of Prophecy at the Revival Hall on the East side of Belfast. My only problem was that these people were Pentecostals who spoke in tongues, which ran contrary to everything I was taught at my own church where speaking in tongues was forbidden. However after some time I reached the conclusion that if the folks atof the Holy Spirit and Speaking in Tongues". Because of his "Kingdom Identity" views (which hold that Israel, not the church, is the bride of Christ, in contradiction to the teachings of the Westminster Confession of Faith) and his conversion to Pentecostalism, Campbell left the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster and, while he continues to promote Ian Paisley and his literature (as well as to adhere to the Presbyterian doctrine of Calvinism), many of the clergy that Paisley moderates have attacked Campbell, such as Reverend T.A. Dunlop, to whom Campbell responded in his tract "British-Israel, Fact or Fiction?".

Campbell began preaching in May 1974, and preached his first sermon on Bible prophecy on 24 September 1978 (he expounded on Ezekiel 38, interpreting it as a prediction of a future invasion of Ireland by Russia), and was baptised by full immersion in 1979 (although he had already been baptised by sprinkling as an infant). He was officially ordained to the ministry by Dr Francis Thomas on 18 July 1988. He graduated from the University of London with a Bachelor's degree in History, and from the Queen's University of Belfast with a Certificate in Biblical Studies. He recently retired from the post of head of religious studies at Newtownabbey Community High School near Belfast. He is author of a number of Bible study books, and has lectured on Protestant and Prophetic platforms throughout the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Australia. However, his ministry is decidedly centred in Ulster, and many of his messages and website updates deal with the political situation there. Campbell has contact to the "Christian Assemblies International"[1]

Views and opinions

So controversial are his views on the IRA, whom he describes as "the Roman Catholic terrorists of the Marxist IRA" that he was sent a death threat on 7 June 1999, in the form of some mailed ammunition and a warning to leave the country in seventy-two hours. This prompted "an urgent call to prayer" in the Open-Bible Ministries' "Kingdom Tidings" webpage. The threat was disregarded by the police.

Campbell preaches obedience to "God's Laws" to the point of condemning miscegenation, sometimes using rather unorthodox interpretations of certain verses to justify his objections to race-mixing. In the second part of his series "Jeremiah: From Jerusalem to the Emerald Isle", he quotes Jeremiah 2:22 ("for though thou wash thee with nitre, and take thee much soap, yet thine iniquity is marked before me, saith the Lord ") before asking his audience: "What sin could the people of Israel have committed that soap and water wouldn't wash away?" He answers his own query with "miscegenation", which he opposes vociferously. Campbell believes that "they had mingled the holy seed with the other races and peoples and nationalities", and, as he does in his sermon "The Unholy Land ... (2)", he teaches that Isaiah 3:8-9 refers to the "alien" facial features adopted by the Hebrews through intermarrying with other peoples. He is a firm believer in the observance of the Sabbath; however, he believes that it does not need to be kept on the seventh day of the week, but simply on whichever day the Christian wishes to rest. Indeed, he himself conducts Bible studies in Cregagh S.C. Hall, not on Saturday, but on Wednesday and Sunday nights. (In his sermon on "The Real Saint Patrick", he says, in an apparently approving tone: "The Celtic Church taught obedience to God's Laws and they didn't keep the same festivals as the organized Roman Church, and, although I'm not getting into this tonight, I have read some accounts by various authors who actually state that the ancient Celtic Church, for a period of time (not their whole history, but for a period of time) were Saturday worshippers." This suggests some sympathy towards seventh-day keepers such as the Seventh-Day Adventists, who share many beliefs with him.) He does not eat pork (although some of his disciples do), and he defends the observance of the food laws in his pamphlet "Did Christ and His Apostles Keep the Food Laws?"

He also refutes what he sees as the 'unbiblical' doctrine of the immortality of the soul, even preaching a four-part series entitled "Dead or Alive?", teaching instead the heterodox view of annihilationism. It is unclear what Campbell's views on the Trinity are; however, he has referred to Pastor Gordon Magee, a Oneness Pentecostal preacher and debater most renowned for writing a booklet called "Is Jesus in the Godhead or is the Godhead in Jesus?" promoting the pre-Nicene heresy of Monarchianism. Although the only translation used at his Bible study meetings is the King James Bible, nevertheless unlike the Ruckmanites, however, Campbell also uses an Amplified Bible, a Ferrar Fenton Bible, and a Lamsa Bible in his personal research, but he insists: "I'm only looking at them in the same sense as I would look at a concordance or a lexicon, and I'm not looking at them in the same way as I view the Authorized Version of the Scripture, from which I preach".

Pro-Campbell links

The Ensign Trust website contains several articles of interest to British-Israelites and Protestants, including essays by Alan Campbell.

Armageddon Books advertises Alan's exposition on Revelation 9 on their page selling Historicist literature, and links to his website.

This Independent Baptist's website has scanned Alan's anti-Catholic booklet The Idol Shepherd of Zechariah, which presents the case that the Biblical Book of Zechariah prophecied the Papacy as the Antichrist. (You can hear Alan himself preach on this subject online.)

Pastor Frank W. Dowsett of The Covenant Vision Ministry describes his experience as a guest speaker at Cregagh in his 2002 U.K. tour report.

The Christ's Assembly References Open Bible Ministries as an a 7th day independent church.

Anti-Campbell links

"British Israelism" Examined and its Errors Exposed contains several of the characteristic criticisms of Alan levelled by Presbyterian ministers.

The Truth About KJV Only first appeared in the summer and autumn, 2001, edition of Moriel Newsletter, and was written by the director of Moriel Ministries, Messianic Jewish preacher James Jacob Prasch. This article claims that Alan "recently ran scared from a debate challenge by a distinguished Professor". In point of fact, when Jacob Prasch visited Belfast in September 1997 and denounced British-Israelism at the Agape Christian Fellowship, Pastor Campbell preached a sermon the following week refuting Mr. Prasch's criticisms entitled "Identity Truth Defended 1997 (An Answer to J. Prasch)". Alan also made a point-by-point rebuttal to Mr. Prasch's anti-KJV article in June 2002 entitled "Jakob [sic] Prasch vs. the King James Bible". Recordings of both sermons can be purchased from Open-Bible Ministries' website, although the former is referred to as "REPLY TO JACOB PRASCH" in the catalogue and as "Jacob Prasch versus our Authorised King James Bible" elsewhere on the site. Prasch's arguments against British-Israelism are found on a recorded message titled “British Israelism — Debunking the Myth”; which may be obtained from Moriel Ministries here.

Irish Republican News refers to Alan as "a fringe figure" who "launched an Internet site to promote his brand of hardline loyalism" in one of their articles.

Guardian Unlimited: The Observer refers to Alan in an article on anti-Catholicism in the Orange Order as "one of the most truculent Protestant preachers" in Ulster and states that he "has since set up his own religious grouping which regurgitates the fantasy that the people of Ulster are the lost tribe of Israel" and that he "has penned a raft of anti-Catholic pamphlets with titles such as 'The Beast Has a Banner'. In his taped sermons, he refers to Catholics as 'people of the wafer God'." In a more recent article, he is described as a "shadowy figure" who propagates in his Rome Watch newssheet (which is called an "ultra-loyalist hate sheet") "revolting bigotry", while his British-Israelite views are derided as "patent nonsense".